


She Talks to Angels

by Ninkasa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 00:45:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1668539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ninkasa/pseuds/Ninkasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's hard to have a normal life when all you see are monsters and evil everywhere you look.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Talks to Angels

When she is fourteen, she sees her first demon. Claire actually wouldn’t call it her first. She very distinctly remembers the way her mother had looked when that thing had been possessing her. But it is the first time since then that she’d happened upon one of those things from that time. She is sitting in homeroom when she looks up at the substitute and started. She can see the thing’s true face twisting and malforming Ms Reynold’s usually sweet face. 

Claire takes a deep breath and tries not to draw more attention to herself than was necessary. The rest of the day is spent in terror with stomach cramps and panic attacks before she can flee back to her house. The house her mother had moved them into after the Winchesters had barrelled their way into their lives and burned it down with sulfur and bright shining light. 

Her mother isn’t home, but she manages to rifle through the old desk drawer, digging out cell phone that her mother never used. It takes her five hours to get the thing to charge long enough to get the phone to let her into the contacts. Scrolling down to the W’s to find Sam Winchester’s name. Claire hesitates for a long moment, clutching the phone in her hand and listening for the sound of her mother returning. She can do it. Push the number, bring the brothers who’d destroyed her family back to her doorstep and rid herself of the knowledge that these things do exist and she had to deal with them.

The phone rings for several moments before she heard the sound of a voice she’d almost forgotten coming across the line in a pre-recorded message. “You’ve reached the voicemail of Sam Winchester. If you have this number, you must know what to do.” 

Claire takes a breath and launches into her diatribe. “Sam. It’s Claire. Claire Novak.” She paced. Her hands ring her hair and she leans and taps against the wall as she tries to explain. “I think there’s a. . .a demon in my school. She looks like my mom did that night.” She waits a moment. “Please, Sam.” She lets out a breath. “I don’t know what to do.”

She hangs up after that and goes back to her room. Tries to focus on To Kill a Mockingbird while she is aware of the fact that Ms. Reynolds was likely being tortured as she does. Claire shakes her head and keeps the cell phone close to her. 

She never receives a response and the demon or Ms. Reynolds or both leave town. Some said she’d gotten a job offer. Some said a boyfriend. Some just said she started acting strangely. And Claire hated herself for not being able to do more. 

It carries on after that. She can see the ghost that haunts the movie theater. The girl who fell from the balcony. She is sure it’s a vampire gang that moved in down the road, but she doesn’t know what to do. Her voicemails fly into a void and no one ever calls her back.

She tries to go on with her life. But finds herself researching things that she never would have gotten an interest in otherwise. Ways to stop ghosts. What a Wendigo is. Tulpas and shtrigas. She suddenly has knowledge she didn’t before. But no practical knowledge on how to use it. 

And everywhere, there are monsters. Children disappearing. Women and men murdered gruesomely and Claire doesn’t know what to do with her new found knowledge.

She keeps trying to call. And after her fifteenth birthday, she stops trying to find her old outlet and starts trying to find someone on her own. Someone had to have taught the Winchesters what they knew. Someone could teach her the same. 

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and she is alone in her house, reading up on a myth of a haunted videogame when there is the sound of an engine she hears only in her nightmares coming down the road.

Claire stops in lifting her soda can to her mouth and freezes. She thinks she imagined it at first and starts to go back to Ben Drowned when the knock on the door makes her jump. She picks up the fire poker that sits near her computer and goes to the door.

Through the curtain that hangs over the door, she catches sight of an old battered leather jacket and the shiny black car past the arm she can see. Claire takes a breath and slowly opens the door. 

The man standing on her porch looks more weary and tired than he had that night. Some of the tightness and anger has gone from his shoulders, but she still recognizes him. Dean Winchester. The one the angel Castiel had gone to save. The one he’d risked her family for. 

Claire stands and stares, fire poker forgotten in her hand as Dean looks her up and down, a frown turning into a gentle smile as he sees her, although he frowns again at the sight of her makeshift weapon.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, a voice she suspects he reserves for frightened animals and women who want to do him injury coming through. “Do you remember me?”

Claire wants to roll her eyes but nods instead. “I do,” she said, glancing past him to the empty car and back at him then. 

“You’re late.”

He laughs slightly at that. “Sorry about that.” He shoves his hands down into his pockets and seems to be trying to make himself seem smaller. As if it’s possible. “I’ve been out of the loop for a while.” He hesitates. “And then it took me awhile to track down where you and your mom had moved to.” Silence again, then. “You said you were having some trouble?”

A thousand questions come to her then. Where is Sam? What happened to Castiel? Were all the fires and deaths all those years ago that Apocalypse they’d said would happen? Why did it take him so _long_? She can’t ask any of them. Not with him standing on her porch and her still in her pyjamas. There are hours in the day before her mother is off work and maybe he can help her explain in a way she never could. Why Claire has nightmares and flinches when some people look at her. 

Claire lets out a sharp breath and pushes the door open. “Come in,” she says. “This is going to take awhile.”


End file.
